This Blog is going to be following the information gathered from my research in Animation. The focus of my research is to find student friendly methods of teaching animation, and making it accessible and simple for teachers to use it in their classrooms. I will be testing different kinds of animation and, hopefully, troubleshooting through techniques to find the most effective system. This study may help start a path to making the use of animation in the classroom accessible.

Plot line:
The students will be looking at the pictures in the activities gallery and creating a performance animation that tells a portion of the story that each picture is depicting. The students can be given the choice of doing a stop motion sand animation as well , but keep in mind this process will take longer. If there are a lot People waiting to go do
- Performance animation is where the action of the sand being moved is filmed instead of taken pictures of frame by frame. The student's hands creating the image are part of the animation.

Introduction:

The Huichol indigenous people are from central America. They are referred to in the larger world as the Huichol, but they refer to themselves as the Wixaritari (the people). They are well known for their beautifully colored crafts. The type of art that we will be focused on it this animation is their Yarn painting. Yarn painting is not just a thing of the past. It is till alive today as you can see on the walls of the tweed.
The Huichol people created these yarn panting to tell stories of their history or, myths, or as a way to communicate.

Instruction:
1. As the participants come in you will give them a small introduction of what they will be doing and who the Huichol people are.
a. They will be creating their own performance sand animation in response to one of the yarn paintings from the Huichol Culture on the wall.
b. In between each participant turn off the camera, so all that it seen is the performance and not the set up between people.
2. First: They will each get a note card were they will have to plan out what they are going to do. They will have to make a little mock drawing of the Yarn painting and they will have to write a little plan for how they will illustrate the story that is depicted.
3. Second: They will choose the colors they will be using. I have 2 sheets of plastic so when one is being used the other one can be cleaned and prepped for the next person to use.
4. Third: They will start by pouring the sand on the plastic, they may use 2 colors if they blend well together.
5. Fourth: They will then begin to move the sand around to make their image and tell their story. When they are finished they will remove the plastic and be responsible for cleaning it, so the next person can use it.
6. Fifth: One they are finished cleaning the sand they are free to leave or participate in another animation if there is time.

The sand animation project went very well. I had many new people come to the demonstration, so I was able to collect a lot of information on successes and weaknesses in the lesson. The type of sand animation that we did was performance. So instead of taking many pictures of each sand design I had a camera filming them. I will be taking the film, speeding it up, and setting it to music. This style of animation would be great for younger students. They can tell a story with their hands and have the freedom to communicate with each other at the same time.

Our sand Animation were based on the Hoichol yarn painting hung in the Tweed Museum. The participants were given a small history of the Hoichol Culture and then I told them the meaning of the yarn paintings. They created Sand animations that were based on the stories told by each of the pieces of art work.

Successes:
- Each person seemed to enjoy animating and they took the project very seriously.
- I allowed them to work in pairs if they wanted to. I do not see any problem with doing this in a classroom. The work was still very unique to each student and they still left with the understanding I was hoping to achieve.
- The students were able to talk while they worked which opened up a dialogue about the culture as well as the art being made.
- This is a very quick lesson in a classroom I could see the lecture and filming only taking 2 class periods. Depending on how long winded you are, how big your class is, and how many cameras you have of course.

Things to remember:
- Because this was a walk through lesson I gave very scripted short cultural information, but if you were to be doing this in a classroom you would want to go more into detail. Engage the students in a discussion about the culture, don't just do an over view.
- Use different colors of sand for each animation. This will be more work but it will make your video more visually interesting.
- Stop the video between students so you have a clear definition of when a new student starts and ends.

I was not able to get as many participants a I would have liked, so this animation station was more of a trial and error experience for me. But for the students that did come I was able to get quite a bit of information from.

Because I have been doing this a while, I have forgotten a lot of the things that others may not know right off the bat. For example: If you are having a chalk creature wave at you, you do not need to redraw the whole character in order to make him wave. The student can just move the arm to get that effect.

Since I LOVE lists, I am going to write an outline of things to remember.

1. Students may draw things too small, or their character may shrink as time goes on.
- If you are worried about this happening, have a student create a stencil of their characters body so it can have some consistency through out the animation. This way you can also approve of the size of creature before its drawn on the board.
2. If you are going to have a student in the animation as well as the chalk, be sure you tape the floor where the student will stand is going to be.
- that way your student isn't jumping all around the screen in the final product.
3. Be sure the chalk board is secure, you dont want your animation to look like it is going through an earth quake.
4. Would suggest using this with an older group of students, it is a lot more complex than stop motion.